Introduction to WordPress Ad Manager plugin. Creating and editing ads.
Introduction
Ad Manager WD plugin is a user-friendly tool developed to easily create, publish and manage advertisements on your WordPress sites. Its straightforward, yet extensive functionality lets you have these features:
- Place any advertisement code to your website, including Google AdSense or just HTML,
- Create advert groups and organize the ads on your website,
- Apply schedules to each advertisement,
- Display published adverts in three different modes,
- Easily control the placement of adverts and advert groups,
- Control the weight and visibility of ads throughout your site,
- Target users from specific locations all over the globe,
- Keep track of feedback using plugins tracker, as well as Google Analytics and Piwik Analytics,
- Manage user roles for adding, editing and deleting adverts, as well as schedules.
And this is just a summary of Ad Manager WD features. Now let’s get started on creating adverts, groups, schedules and managing the plugin’s settings.
Creating an advertisement
After installing and activating Ad Manager WD plugin, click on Ad Manager WD menu item from left menu bar of WordPress dashboard. You will be redirected to All Adverts page, where you can see the list of advertisements. Press Add New Advert to start creating a new one.
New Advert
Firstly make sure to provide a Title for your advert entry. Ad Code option holds the code for your advertisement. You can write the following types of code as the value of Ad Code option:
- HTML and CSS,
- Javascript,
- Specific advertisement code, such as Google AdSense.
Important: This option does not accept PHP code. Please avoid adding it to Ad Code setting.
Useful tags will let you quickly include the featured image of current advert, or its title. Moreover, it provides some attributes, which will help you with the code, if your are writing HTML. Click on tags once to add them to your advertisement code.
As soon as the code for the advertisement is provided, you will be able to see a quick preview of it. Mark Statistics option as checked to enable tracking of clicks and impressions of this advert.
Advanced
Use Show on setting if you wish you wish to disable current advertisement on Desktops, Tablets or Smartphones. Leave all unchecked to display this ad on all devices.
In case you do want to have the advert on smartphones and tablets, make sure to enable its Responsiveness. Use Image For Smartphones and Image For Tablets options to choose pictures for mobile display from Media Library. This lets you have your advertisement displayed nicely on any screen size.
Weight represents the display frequency of current advert. In other words, if it has larger weight than other ads in the same group, it will appear in your advertisement section more often.
Use Sortorder to set ordering of adverts in the same group displayed with Block type as its Mode. Alternatively you can skip this by leaving the option empty or setting it to 0. We will thoroughly cover ad group modes in Groups section of this user guide.
Geo Targeting
Geo Targeting settings of Ad Manager WD plugin let you advertise to users based in specific locations from all around the globe. You can select certain cities, states and countries with the following options. If you wish to use geo targeting, make sure to choose a Geo Service from Ad Manager WD > Settings > Statistics tab.
Cities/States allows you to indicate the list of cities (or the Metro ID) and states (or their ISO codes) to choose locations where current ad will display. Make sure to separate the values by commas.
Whereas with Countries setting you can mark all countries, which you would like to be geographical targets of this advertisement.
Publishing
You can determine the placement of your advertisement with this set of options. Ad Manager WD plugin lets you add your adverts to widget areas, categories, posts and pages. We will discuss publishing of widgets later on in this guide. Let’s go through the rest of its methods now.
Placement option can be used to specify the location of current advert in a post, page or category. Correspondingly it can be added in one of the following sections:
- Before Content
- After Content
- Before And After Content
- Inside The Content
There’s also a way to be more specific in the placement of your ad in those entries. You can set the number of paragraph, after which your advert will show up. For instance, if you write 3, the ad will appear below the 3rd paragraph on a post/page.
Select corresponding options to inject your advertisement in a post, page or category. In case you select Show advert in category option, the list of post categories you have will appear right below. Make sure to choose the ones where you want your ad to display.
Similarly, the list of pages and posts will show up for you to select, when you mark Show advert in posts and Show advert in pages options as checked.
Publishing as a Widget
Besides injecting advertisements into post, page or category pages, you can also publish them as widgets. Go to Appearance > Widgets to start the setup.
Find Ad Manager WD widget and place it to one of the widget areas your website theme provides. Provide a Title for the widget, and select an advert or group. Afterwards save the widget, and the advertisement will appear on your website frontend.
Choose Schedules
After you create schedules for your advertisement, they will be mentioned under this section of advertisement editor page. This lets you set exact start and end date for the advertisement. In case you select one or multiple schedules, your advert will display during the selected period.
Leave all schedules unchecked, in case you wish to always display current advert on your website frontend.
Wrapper Code
This option of Ad Manager WD plugin allows you to place additional code before and after the advertisement. It accepts HTML, CSS and Javascript code. Alternatively you can leave it blank, if you don’t need a wrapper around the ad.
Let’s say you wish to wrap your advertisement inside a container. You can set <div class="ad-wrapper">
as the value of Before Advert option, and write a corresponding </div>
closing tag in After Advert textarea.
Advertiser
As an administrator you can select the author of current advertisement using Advertiser option. The list of registered users is available with its select box. This helps you identify the creators or owners of the advert.
Simply click on the dropdown menu and choose the user account which would be the advertiser of current entry.
Geo targeting
If you wish to have geo targeting functionality on your advertisement entries, you can select one of the two Geo Servicesfrom this section. Max Mind Free option uses the free version of Max Mind geo targeting service. It is precise and will let you target all specified locations correctly.
You can alternatively use Max Mind Pro option, which is the paid version of this service. Max Mind Free is automatically integrated with Ad Manager WD plugin. Whereas Max Mind Pro requires your account username and password to incorporate its geo service with the plugin.
Advertisement and Schedule Roles
WordPress Ad Manager WD plugin lets you have full control on setting up user roles, which will be able to complete the following actions related to adverts and schedules:
- Edit their own adverts and schedules,
- Edit other’s adverts and schedules,
- Delete their own adverts and schedules,
- Delete other’s adverts and schedules,
- Publish adverts and schedules,
- Assign groups to adverts.
Simply mark each user role option, which will have the privileges to perform actions mentioned above. Note, that user accounts with Administrator role have full access to the plugin.